Advanced Structural Testing Centre

All our work is certified and irrefutable and the results are auditable, giving our customers complete peace of mind.

We are accredited by the United Kingdom Accreditation Service (UKAS) and are currently the only structural test facility within a UK university to hold ‘in-house methods’ accreditation.

This means we are not restricted to testing to specified international procedures, but can also develop new test procedures in collaboration with our customers to prove out components under real-world conditions.

We are able to physically validate research, analysis, material properties, components, sub-assemblies, and full assemblies for both research and commercial projects.

Our capabilities range from testing coupons to prove the material properties of new manufacturing processes, to complete finished components and assemblies.

We can test materials ranging from composites, including metal matrix composites, and ceramics to rapid prototype filled lattices, steels, hi-tech alloys and other metals, such as aluminium.

Physical size, load requirements and the number of measurements needing to be made at the same time present no barriers for the wide range of equipment in our fully-fitted workshop.

Our large reconfigurable testing rig can cope with components up to 10 metres square and its actuators can exert a combined force equivalent of 800 tonnes as a compressive or tensile load, giving us the capability to carry out tests for the civil engineering, rail and marine sectors.

Further down the scale, we can carry out static and fatigue tests in the one meganewton to 10 kilonewton range and have the capacity to go as low as one newton.

We can also apply tension, compression or fatigue forces simultaneously from eight separate points on a component, sub-assembly or assembly, over a period of time.

Meanwhile, our state of the art data recording equipment can record up to 200 channels of data, taking 16,000 samples, from each sensor every second, if necessary.